I love my 360, both the launch version that died to a rrod at 4 years of age, and its newer replacement. The 360 controller is like a work of art compared to the ps3 dual shock controller. It just fits my hands so much better. I don't love xbox live, and can't stand the evolving add fest of the interface. I don't have confidence that xbox one live will be any better. I also have become disillusioned with MS's ability to make good hardware.

This generation my launch console will be the PS4. They just seem to have their shit together more than MS this time around. I'm on board with their vision for next gen gaming and their hardware design. I've also read good reports about the PS4 controller. Because of my kids, having access to Netflix streaming without having to go through a paywall is also a plus for PS4. I still can't believe that MS keeps those services that their customers are already paying for behind a paywall. That's nuts.

I have a decent PC, so that will be my other gaming system at launch for next gen titles. I also think that the odds of games making their way to PC will be higher for Xbox 1 exclusives than for PS4 exclusives. PS3 exclusives almost never made it to PC.

No, I was referring to the term "PC" being a Microsoft product (generally speaking).

With Titanfall though, IIRC MS Studios is the publisher, EA owns Remedy, the creators of Titanfall. While it's entirely possible that EA could publish this through Origin, with a flagship game like this (and MS being publisher, they've footed the bill) that I see it coming out on Win8x only, and through the MS store (much like Halo: Spartan Assault).

They're shutting down Games For Windows and there is no surprise there - MS is consolidating their fragmented marketplaces into the same pool - this was announced weeks ago though they have not disclosed how, or how soon.

As to cloud - the game itself relies on pushing some of the computations to MS's Azure servers - this will definitely be an "online only" game.

No, I was referring to the term "PC" being a Microsoft product (generally speaking).

With Titanfall though, IIRC MS Studios is the publisher, EA owns Remedy, the creators of Titanfall. While it's entirely possible that EA could publish this through Origin, with a flagship game like this (and MS being publisher, they've footed the bill) that I see it coming out on Win8x only, and through the MS store (much like Halo: Spartan Assault).

They're shutting down Games For Windows and there is no surprise there - MS is consolidating their fragmented marketplaces into the same pool - this was announced weeks ago though they have not disclosed how, or how soon.

As to cloud - the game itself relies on pushing some of the computations to MS's Azure servers - this will definitely be an "online only" game.

Holly crap there is so much wrong with this post. Respawn, not Remedy is making Titan Fall. EA does not own Respawn, they are an independent studio working via the EA partners program. In fact EA doesn't even own the Titan Fall property as Respawn has retained all property rights.

The fitness stuff is enough for me to get the Xbox personally, but as you guys know I like it for the other stuff too. Also Sony can go to hell. <-- personal bias on personal treatment over the years.

100% agree with your hint that Sony has a long and reliable history of being one of the most arrogant companies on planet Earth. Somehow, with one bad introductory press conference by Microsoft, they are the champions of the people.

Just don't put your credit card on file with them. Every hacker in the eastern hemisphere will have your account before the year is out.

No, I was referring to the term "PC" being a Microsoft product (generally speaking).

With Titanfall though, IIRC MS Studios is the publisher, EA owns Remedy, the creators of Titanfall. While it's entirely possible that EA could publish this through Origin, with a flagship game like this (and MS being publisher, they've footed the bill) that I see it coming out on Win8x only, and through the MS store (much like Halo: Spartan Assault).

They're shutting down Games For Windows and there is no surprise there - MS is consolidating their fragmented marketplaces into the same pool - this was announced weeks ago though they have not disclosed how, or how soon.

As to cloud - the game itself relies on pushing some of the computations to MS's Azure servers - this will definitely be an "online only" game.

See the edit at the end? Two things wrong, not "so many". Yeah... meds are working overtime on my brain (got the R right - I use Remedy at work and it somehow stuck). But hey, feel free to kick me when I'm down.

Like I said - MS is consolidating their products - they're doing it with marketplaces, they're doing it with communication. This may not be a good thing (as a GT staff meeting on Skype yesterday showed us).

Titanfall (per dev video posted earlier this week) was based on using online servers to offload AI and some processing work. Clearly this also being on the 360 it may not be a hard-and-fast requirement. The PC version though, I could see them going the same way with cloud gaming server connections, and if there is truly a benefit to it, that might not be something Sony is up for.

Also, I've gone back and edited the text. You have a copy of the edit there, so no need to hear about it again when the next person traipses by.

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"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

Neither at launch. Honestly haven't seen anything yet that impresses me, nor does it seem like much of a graphical leap from the current generation. That said I will eventually end up with both, but it won't be for a few years. I'll pick up the inevitable much later, newer, better designed PS4 after my PS3 dies. XBOne doesn't really interest me at all, even with the new Dead Rising. I know I will eventually get one, but again it won't be a first run machine. Got burned on that before, not doing it again. Looking forward to impressions though! Maybe the temptation will be too much for me and will break down and grab the PS4 when Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out.

So for all those that are in on day one, what's the first game you throw in that shiny new console once it's hooked up?

Nothing for me. I already bought my last gaming console for a while this week, the 3DS XL.

I think the launch lineups are awful for both consoles. Of the 3 "next gen" consoles, the Wii U has one game I am interested in (Wind Waker HD) which is something I've already played.

I really was hoping the XBone or the PS4 would come out for around $300. At $399 or $499, I am just not interested until one of them has multiple games I am interested in playing.

Now, I keep hearing about how these things are basically "PCs". If someone hacks one puts Windows on it and declares one or the other a viable gaming PC, then I would be far more interested. Or, if not viable as a gaming PC, if viable as a HTPC, then I might get one sooner than planned.

I don't recall any game in the past using a 'cloud' system to handle any processing other than standard server type things. This isn't the same as just having dedicated servers for a game. They are talking about offloading individual types of processing seamlessly in the background while you play, that is a big deal.

I don't recall any game in the past using a 'cloud' system to handle any processing other than standard server type things. This isn't the same as just having dedicated servers for a game. They are talking about offloading individual types of processing seamlessly in the background while you play, that is a big deal.

It's very much the same in terms of the required elements (servers, software, and code), it's just a different utilization of it.

I'm not saying the utilization might not be cool, though I've yet to hear ANY specific detail on wtf it's going to do - the only actual cloud thing I've ever heard of doing this in an actual functional way is nVidia CloudLight, and that's still way early in the POC stage. However, to think it's in any way unique to Microsoft is just buying into the marketing. MSFT is providing infrastructure (servers and sometimes software) that a dozen other companies can provide. It's up to the developers to make use of it (code). If the Titanfall devs do something cool, there's no reason that they couldn't or wouldn't do it on another platform, other than money.

I don't recall any game in the past using a 'cloud' system to handle any processing other than standard server type things. This isn't the same as just having dedicated servers for a game. They are talking about offloading individual types of processing seamlessly in the background while you play, that is a big deal.

Let's put it like this: Your bandwidth is a way, WAY more problematic bottleneck than your CPU/GPU. Any useful data wouldn't be able to transmit what you need in time. Cloud clusters are great for business applications, but for realtime gaming? No.

"Cloud" is a buzzword for "online save game backups and dedicated servers" in his coming console generation. Nothing more.

I do know they're leveraging cloud - which means that either that will have to happen [edit: locally] on the PS4, or Sony would need to come up with similar infrastructure.

Umm... Azure is not the only "cloud" services provider in the world. In fact they aren't even the biggest. Cloud is just a computer that isn't in your network.

EA has hosted services before. I'm pretty sure they have the capability. Or AWS does. Or Terremark. Or Rackspace. Or about a dozen other companies.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop buying into the "cloud" hype cycle.

Hence similar structure comment. Read what is written. The closer the developers can work to the same blueprint, the less work there is. TF is an online game (even if there is an included offline mode - I have not seen any confirmation of that). The entire campaign is designed with that in mind.

It may be that:

a) the Xbox one is simply not powerful enough to handle everything and needs to use cloud tech - high-end PCs and PS4 will do so natively - or or there may be tech trade-offsb) the offloading model will be consistent across next gen ( and possibly current-gen) game consoles

My previous statement did not preclude these possibilities - in fact, it suggested them.

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"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

I don't recall any game in the past using a 'cloud' system to handle any processing other than standard server type things. This isn't the same as just having dedicated servers for a game. They are talking about offloading individual types of processing seamlessly in the background while you play, that is a big deal.

Let's put it like this: Your bandwidth is a way, WAY more problematic bottleneck than your CPU/GPU. Any useful data wouldn't be able to transmit what you need in time. Cloud clusters are great for business applications, but for realtime gaming? No.

"Cloud" is a buzzword for "online save game backups and dedicated servers" in his coming console generation. Nothing more.

I wouldn't go that far. I think they could do lots of ancillary things in the cloud, but they also should make it in such a way that it was latency resilient. Azure's footprint is actually fairly good, but you couldn't count on great latency for all users since there's so much you do not control. Basically you'd code it to where if the backend infrastructure was down or latent, you'd have degraded quality in the game of some sort, but the game itself should still function.

Or you say fuck you to anyone with less than a 100ms connection to an Azure DC, but good luck trying to get that to fly.

But if we're going with "official", I'm going to say that MS has put up reasons why not to believe that "cloud" simply translates to a roaming profile and some network storage space. Oh, and that validation of the function of their Live cloud gaming platform? They're going to have to buy off indie developers as well, who are given access to it for free:

Quote

Our intent was to enable developers to take advantage of server resources in their games without having to deal with the challenges that come with building, managing and running servers at scale. So, we chose to provide cloud features that allow the game creators to push the limits of their gameplay experiences and apply the bulk of their investments to game creation, rather than server and operational resources. In fact, we even give them the cloud computing power for FREE so they can more easily transition to building games on Xbox One for the cloud.

It's not that the tech isn't useful, it's just not new or revolutionary (or even Microsoft exclusive), and it's certainly not going to revolutionize the world in the way some of you think. I can't help but be reminded of how the Sony folks sounded when talking about the Cell processor back before the PS3 came out.

The first tech demo was built to demonstrate the processing power of the Xbox One. Exploring the ways that the system can crunch on giant data sets, NASA had given Microsoft all of the celestial bodies down to the asteroid level all the way out to 35,000 light years from our sun. The initial render of 40,000 inter-solar system asteroids, all with their position and orbital trajectory rendered in real time, would require 10 times the processing power to compute. Thanks to the cloud architecture, they could throw far more than that at the equation. Pushing the number to over 350,000 individually computed objects by connecting the Xbox One to the limitless global cloud, they could crunch over 500,000 data updates per second, with the closest being updated locally and most often, and the furthest away being handled in the cloud. Game developers could apply this same technology, pushing items that aren’t updated often into the cloud while letting the system tackle the visible objects. These worlds could be persistent and truly ever-evolving as they can exist perpetually in the cloud. They can change, take damage, be attacked, or anything else – truly the potential to create limitless worlds that don’t power down when you log off.

The demonstration (which I got to see myself), showed the 40,000 closest objects as green (IIRC), which would have required 10 360's to keep track of. They then popped up the other 350,000 asteroids in purple. Now these were not in a per-second position, but maintained as closely as was possible. As we flew through space, some of the close ones went from green to purple, signifying they weren't close enough for the console to render, but instead allowed the cloud to handle those objects. Other objects replaced them.

Now consider a game like Dead Rising 3 - where you're carving your way through thousands of zombies. Ones that can't be seen aren't simply spawned as you get close, but instead exist - perhaps even being killed by other players in the game world. We know that the zombies are randomly generated and are unique in their appearances, so you're also not getting the Dynasty-Warriors horde of clones to kill.

Whether it pans out has yet to be seen - or whether developers take to it and can provide a reason to go there. I can't see why not though - and dismissing that kind of power as disk storage is about the same as saying "oh, another Dual Shock controller? Must be the same as the last one!"

But tilt, if you're willing to bet on it - I'd gladly take you up on it. The odds are certainly in my favour that this isn't just a fancy profile that follows a login.

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"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

For anybody else sick of seeing "the cloud", I highly recommend the Cloud to Butt browser extension to change your point of view. It changes any instances of "the cloud" into "my butt" to hilarious results.

As for the uses they have stated for the Xbox One cloud so far, it sounds like nothing more than dedicated servers. Offloading AI to "the cloud"? That's already what every dedicated server running a game with AI does. The server is authoritative and runs your AI processes. Duh.

Now, having a widespread network of Azure servers to run game servers on is nothing to sneeze at, I'm just saying "the cloud" is not solving magical new problems other than scalability and distribution at this point.

ENo9, how many games provided dedicated servers in Gen7, and how many developers can afford to run a server farm (part of the bullet that sunk THQ was Homefronts dedicated server farm)? How many games of the last gen were peer-to-peer? And as for something like Drivatars, that AI isn't just spinning up for a generated MP session - it's using it constantly, and that AI is earning you money while you're offline so it's more than just the concept of "spawn 5xtypeA,4xtypeB;GoGoGo!".

Just like all the cool features for new consoles that developers haven't built for yet (due to budget, time, and platform development considerations), we're not going to see the best and brightest uses of Move, Kinect, Cloud computing, social interaction, etc in the first wave of games - certainly not in cross-platform titles. They'll look impressive, sure - I've seen it myself with PS4's version of Skylanders a month ago (first-hand). Sexy - but effectively a graphics upgrade with no "game-changing" elements (announced at that time - we don't have the final product yet). I expect the same of all multi-platform games at console launch.

I don't want these two giants to go after "exclusive DLC content", instead, I want them to pay up to take advantage of the DIFFERENCES between the console experiences - whether that be SmartGlass/Vita/Kinect/Move/Eye/touchpad, or whatever.

I crave a revolution, not simply an evolution. I've played FPSes - TitanFall and The Division give me hope for new and different ways to enjoy that kind of game. Out of the gates, Sony isn't saying much. They have some indie titles locked in for launch - awesome! Other than Transistor (which is also steam-bound and may even see the Xbox One shores in the future), the only game they have that I feel I *must* play is Second Son, which is a wait regardless.

I've read a lot of comments which are leaning towards "Xbox One exclusives will come to PS4 because the Xbox One will tank" (I paraphrase). This market thrives on competition - we've gone from gladiatorial combat to product competition. Regardless of sales numbers, or even individual experiences, it is my opinion that these two need to dance together.

PSN/PS+ wouldn't be as good as it is if it didn't have XBL cutting it's teeth on new tech, and giving them a reason to try harder. MS dumped billions into getting into this market, and while the launch team at the beginning of this year was complacent in their assessment of the market (and allowed the MS Studios <--> Indie dev connection to rot), they've been kicked in the ass for it.

Good! Now, bring on the games.

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"If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." - Johnny Carson

ENo9, how many games provided dedicated servers in Gen7, and how many developers can afford to run a server farm (part of the bullet that sunk THQ was Homefronts dedicated server farm)? How many games of the last gen were peer-to-peer? And as for something like Drivatars, that AI isn't just spinning up for a generated MP session - it's using it constantly, and that AI is earning you money while you're offline so it's more than just the concept of "spawn 5xtypeA,4xtypeB;GoGoGo!".

Yeah, there aren't that many console games that have used dedicated servers, but you can see more of them going that way even at the end of this generation because they want to get the features that PC has had for ages. Most PC shooters in the last 15 years or longer has had dedicated servers. And of course any MMO and some other types of games as well. Whether those are running on a central server cluster, distributed in many areas or just being hosted in some Joe Schmoe's basement doesn't really change that fact.

Console games used peer-to-peer because it was the cheap way to go, but it has many drawbacks and limitations as well. Certainly any dedicated servers run by the publisher or developer cost them money, which is why I say that the Azure servers are nothing to sneeze at because they make that solution viable and scalable for everybody.

So, lets say I'm a jackass. Lets take this further and say I've been too busy, and somewhat lazy, somehow... And I'd didn't preorder a ps4. Does anyone know of any places still taking preorders? I don't wanna OCD and combust and just get a xbone to satisfy my compulsive needs. Anyone, anywho?!

So, lets say I'm a jackass. Lets take this further and say I've been too busy, and somewhat lazy, somehow... And I'd didn't preorder a ps4. Does anyone know of any places still taking preorders? I don't wanna OCD and combust and just get a xbone to satisfy my compulsive needs. Anyone, anywho?!

I hear Target will have a bunch up for pre-order on 10-25.

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Because I can,also because I don't care what you want.XBL: OriginalCeeKayWii U: CeeKay